Author here. This started as a 2 m² vegetable bed and got out of hand: 8 soil probes, a weather station, a camera, and a Rain Bird valve that I control through an old Android phone tapping its own app.

The part I found interesting: a fixed rules engine for watering kept being wrong in ways that needed context (forecast, last week's response, what the leaves look like). So an agent now runs every morning, reads the full history (4M readings, 62 MB in Iceberg), changes watering within hard limits, and logs what it expects to happen so it can check itself the next day.

Disclosure: the data side runs on LakehouseBox, which I'm building. The code is at github.com/jatorre/garden-lake. Happy to answer anything, including "why not Home Assistant."

It looks like a great and fun project, well on topic for Hacker News! But at least when it comes to posting on HN itself, can you please not use genai? See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#genai and https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated. Your comment here got classified that way. (of course that may be a false positive)

This doesn't mean we're against using AI tools, coding agents, etc. We use them heavily ourselves! We just don't want generated or AI-edited text on HN itself. The community feels strongly about this.

Would you be interested in adding a small patch nearby as a control group? Just to check how much improvement the rig makes?

Your cabbage looks very healthy and sturdy! Very neat!

But in my gardening experience cabbage is just like that. You sensor setup is at least tomato worthy.

Watering is an extremely hard problem to solve. Especially in an economic way

Very nice post! The github repo might still be private though. Getting a 404.

Sad to see even the most obvious AI generated comments aren't being flagged anymore.

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